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The Focus of Education

The first five years in a designer’s career are absolutely critical and the true educational experience. A young designer must appreciate that opportunity to mature while on the job and take nothing for granted. A willingness to do anything and everything he or she can to get experience and learn, from the ground up, should be reinforced by the schools. . . . — your first job is your true MA, your best chance to establish a career path, your opportunity to work on the coolest projects . . ..

First a revision to the thoughts behind my posts of 11-23 and 11-12. Schooling and development are very important and much of the structure to our educational institutions is appropriate. We need to introduce students to traditional ways of thinking and knowing and then help them find new ways of thinking and knowing. But this is the beginning of education, not the end. Students, and indeed, all of us need support as we address real world context and achieve Morin’s contextualization principle of knowledge. This is what Gadi is referencing, contextualization from the ground up. This is where we need personal learning networks in the broadest of conceptions. Peers, mentors, coaches, customers, digital acquaintances from around the world, textual friends from our readings; we need all kinds of help to find our ways and we need institutions, learning structures, designed environments and the like to help us achieve this type of learning network.

This is the task assigned to us by Hagel and Brown: to find a new common sense for how to operate in this 21st Century Economy.